MetaTrader 5: Unloved Child of MetaQuotes

By Alexander

In Forex Basics

Jul 23rd, 2013

5 Comments

9631 Views

One of the Barney Stinson’s (character from “How I met your mother”) rules says “new is always better!” That is quite true, just look at yourself. I bet you don’t read this text from the computer that takes two stores and could warm up an entire city in Alaska after 15 minutes of working. Your phone weights less than your wallet but you can shoot an HD video with it. I’m ready to bet that your car has more than 2 horse powers.But let’s look at the Forex trading market.

Like brothers

In June, 2010 MetaQuotes Software officially released MetaTrader 5 (MT5), but though it was 5 years younger than MT4 for some reasons today you can hardly find 25 brokers who offer you the ability to trade with MT5 live against almost 500 companies remaining on MT4. What are the reasons of that strange situation? I decided to figure them out. To be completely true, I’ve been using MT4 myself, so to tell about MT5 I’ve open the demo account with one of the brokers that offer me such possibility.

First I thought that there might be some considerable interface changes that scare both: traders and brokers from using MT5. However I could hardly find the difference: same charts, same operation buttons, just a bit bigger, everything is on its usual places.

Than I thought about usability of a new platform, I started to check all the menus searching for the differences. I found a couple, and guess what, I liked them. First difference is that the one click trading module is built in from the very beginning, which makes life easier for the short time traders. Another feature of MT5 is a built-in market depth indicator. In theory it is very useful tool, but in practice you have to figure out the correct way of using it, otherwise you could be tricking yourself.

What I found the most convenient change is that indicators now are divided to the categories such as: trend, oscillators, volumes, Bill Williams, etc.

In the toolbox beneath the chart a couple of new tabs appeared. The one that looks interesting to me is “Market”. There you can see different custom indicators and EA available for download. It is very easy to use: pick one, double click on it, read the description and reviews and then press download (up in the right corner). New tools will be automatically placed in the respective spot of your navigator. Other tabs just provide you with the additional information about you r account. Everything else looks for me the same.

What scaring people out of the MT5

First thing that you have to know is that MT5 has been written in the new programming language called MQL5 comparing to C++ that was commonly used for MT4. For the regular users it means that all your custom indicators and EA that was created for MT4 are not working anymore. How pity is that? So the first reason why the MT5 is an unloved child is the fact that users are very much involved in MT4 trading.

On the other side we have brokers who already invest lots of money in MT4, developed the supportive materials, bridges, and executives and they don’t feel like going through that again. Thereby MT5 platform is not offered frequently for the users’ choice. So the second reason why the MT5 is an unloved child is the adaptation difficulties.

Talking about the reasons why people don’t like to use MT5, we cannot pass by the fact that in the beginning this platform was very unstable. Traders who decided to try prentice hand on MT5 reported that it often failed throwing the BSOD right in your face, like a clown did with cake. You might think it’s funny but imagine yourself about to place 2.0 lot order of your life and next moment all you can see is BSOD killing your dream. Anyways, I have to say, that the bug is already fixed and MT5 stays as a Great Wall without any break offs.

That was my vision of why the MT5 is so unpopular comparing to its older brother. Now it would be very interesting for me to know your opinion. Did you have any experience with MT5, and what was that experience? If there are some reasons for MT5 to be so much unloved that I’m missing in my article?

Looking forward to hear from you!

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5 Responses to “MetaTrader 5: Unloved Child of MetaQuotes”

I share the same observations with you. I am very sure that these observations are the reason why MQL added the same features in MT5 to the new Build 500 on MT4 for reasons best known to them. The new build 500 on MT4 allows one click trading, signal services, and market. However, they are still holding back certain features, which cannot be ported into MT5 such as EAs.
In order to drive more attraction to MT5, MQL redesigned the MQL 5 website leaving MQL 4 website with lesser content.

It’s a real problem activate the click trading, every time I want to adjust the Fibo, or trendline. activates the position that one has, whether it muve the SL or TP. In some cases the error is not apparent that these complete moving the position. It is a total turn on click trading mistake.

mt5 has had quite some time to get off the ground. I think as you mention, both traders and brokers are already invested into mt4 and MQ underestimated the user’s attachment to mt4 and unwillingness to want to port over to mt5.

– forced updates. To be fair, mt4/mt5 are retail platforms for brokers, and must cater to a large group of people. But many professional traders value stability over fancy new features. To put it in perspective, there are still stock/futures traders using TradeStation 2000i. Now I am not suggesting that MQ do not update their platform, but what isn’t broken should not be forced-fixed.

– Mt4 started to kick out/discouraging 3rd party apps and ended up incorporating many of these features into mt4 themselves. But their arrogance is actually a 3rd reason why people would shy away from using their platform. I think there is a need to showcase additional 3rd party forex trading platforms, such as cTrader, VertexFX, tradable, etc While MQ will be known for bringing widespread automation to the retail trader, I certainly welcome a non-MQ alternative. I don’t want to get caught up in another one of MQ’s temper tantrums, especially when I am trading live funds.

thanks for the link(all good to go for 4 now -relieved & unisntalling 5). i should have read it before making my comment saying they should have done what they do now (that i didn’t know they were doing).

apologizes !

but still the overlooked and misunderstood OOP angle is to be underlined as it is the one and only answer to “why mt5?” (the route to implement was bad we all agree, & with this new route now, mt5 will disappear real soon i bet)

tbc but i think mq4 scripts should work in mt5 or with very little code (the opposite is false)

As a coder, looking into trading and trading application available, my choice went for mt5 because it’s totally extendable like mt4 but, unlike mt4 it’s OOP.

I understand mt5 is way less about fancy new features than an evolution to object oriented programming (OOP) which is a must do because it is nowadays standards, because it’s faster, because it’s easier to maintain & improve & have a world wide community of developpers collaborating on it. Which would be the great & unique stuff about mt5. okay it’s proprietary but it’s open to anybody input.

mq5 is 2010 so like 4/5 years late to be nice.

I guess brokers have short time views only and fail to see the bigger picture and the necessity to move on but they also don’t understand that technological aspect. Rest of responsibilities is from mq : they should have guessed their clients would resist a change they don’t understand and found a way around to impose it instead of proposing it)

So it’s really disappointing to find out that the market (the best rated brokers i’ve found) is pushing me newbie trader to mt4 and to learn another prehistorical programming language (mq4) if i want to personalize my indicators, experts or money management scripts…

I haven’t found any other stand alone platform allowing this level of customisation but maybe there are ?